“No. That’s not acceptable. We may lose her again. She may manage to get some message out—God knows what or to whom—before we can intercept the ship. Twenty days. That’s all you’ve got. And you’re wasting time on some two-bit embezzler and his Syndicate-bred girlfriend.”
“But Sharifi’s murder—”
“You’re missing the point, Li. Sharifi’s murder—if she really was murdered—is a side issue. The real target is what she was working on and who she was leaking information to.”
“Yes, but the two things are tangled up together. Haas was—”
“Are you trying to tell me that Hannah Sharifi was ignoring her research in order to chase after a second-rate petty thief?”
“No, but—”
“Then we’re in agreement. I want Sharifi’s datasets. I want to know who she showed them to. And most of all I want to know what kind of damage control we need to do in order to prevent them from getting into the wrong hands.”
“The wrong hands being… ?”
“Anyone’s but ours.” Nguyen took a breath and leaned forward. “I have good news. I saw an internal draft of the board’s decision on Metz. It’s not official yet, but I think they’ll clear you.”
“Great,” Li said, but the muscles of her thighs and shoulders ratcheted even tighter as she waited for the other shoe to drop.
“If that happens, I want to talk to you about a new assignment. To Alba.”
“Great.”
“Assuming the board falls your way, that is. There are still a few members on the fence, as I understand it.”
Including Nguyen herself, no doubt. “What would it take to get them off the fence?” Li asked, playing the game and hating herself for it.
“A clean, fast resolution of this investigation, for one thing.”
First the carrot, then the stick.
“Also”—Nguyen paused delicately—“stay away from Cohen for the next little while. You’re a fine officer. A good soldier. But you’re in over your head with him. Cohen, despite all his charming eccentricities, is no harmless crackpot. Talk to him, and you’re talking to the board of directors and sole stockholder of the largest multiplanetary in UN space. He controls shipping lanes and streamspace links to a good third of the Periphery. He has a corporate espionage department that is, without exaggeration, twice the size of our internal affairs division—”
Li laughed. “I think he’s offered me a job in it.”
“Probably. I’m sure you’d be very useful to him. Which is exactly my point. It’s never personal when you talk to him. Don’t let the organic interface lull you into thinking you’re dealing with someone who feels things as we do. You can’t trust him. Except to act in his own best interest. That’s what he’s built to do. Nothing else. There is nothing else for him.”
“Why are you telling me this?” Li asked. “Cohen’s the best freelancer we have. Now he’s suspect?”
“Just because we work with him doesn’t mean we trust him. Some people are too powerful to be challenged. Cohen’s on the Security Council’s watch list, for Heaven’s sake. Don’t forget that. We may not have had enough to take him to court on it, but he deliberately caused the planetary net crash on Kalispell last year. That’s manipulating a network with intent to harm humans. If we’d nailed him on it, he’d have been stripped down to his switches. And Tel Aviv—”
“Tel Aviv was an accident.”
“An accident like Metz?”
Li’s stomach turned over. “What do you mean, Metz?”
“Catherine,” Nguyen said patiently, and Li felt a weird sense of disjuncture at hearing the name that Cohen always called her. “Forget Metz. I’m just asking you to remember he isn’t human.”
“Neither am I,” Li pointed out.
Nguyen gestured impatiently. “That’s not the point. What you are or aren’t… that’s semantics. A few divergent chromosomes. A grandmother whose geneset was assembled by design instead of chance. But in every way that counts, you are human. Cohen is something else entirely. Don’t let personal feelings get in the way of remembering that.”
Nguyen sighed, picked up a fiche, scanned and signed it, and moved it to the other side of her desk.
“Well, that’s over with,” she said. “I hope it wasn’t more unpleasant than it had to be. I think you understand my reasons for raising the issue. Anything else?”
Li started to speak, then hesitated, weighing the risks of telling Nguyen about Korchow. “Yes,” she said. “I had a strange talk with someone the other day. I’m not sure how to proceed.”
Something sparked behind Nguyen’s dark eyes as Li told her about Korchow, and she had a sudden uncomfortable conviction that her meeting with Korchow was the real news Nguyen had been waiting to hear. Maybe even the real reason Nguyen had sent her to Compson’s in the first place. But that was crazy, of course. Even Nguyen didn’t control everything and everyone.
“What makes you think Korchow was in contact with Sharifi?” Nguyen asked.
Li downloaded an image of Korchow’s card and flashed it onto a shared substream. “I found this in her datebook.”
“Well,” Nguyen said, looking at it. “Maybe she was just buying antiques from him.”
“Sure she was.”
“How sure are you he’s Syndicate?”
“I’m not. But he had the look. And if he wasn’t Syndicate, he was doing everything he could to make me think he was.”
“So. Sharifi was talking to a Syndicate agent… about her work, we have to assume. And now the same agent wants to talk to you.”
“What do I do?” Li asked.
Nguyen’s lips thinned in a chilly smile. “You talk to him.”
Helena: 22:10:48.
Korchow’s address put him square in the center of Helena’s commercial district, a five-minute walk, air quality permitting, from the old colonial administration building. But Li had a first stop to make before she saw Korchow: St. Joseph’s Home for Girls. And unlike Korchow’s shop, St. Joe’s wasn’t in the nicer part of town.
Compson’s capital city predated the Bose-Einstein Rush. The elegantly dilapidated domes of the capitol building and governor’s mansion recalled the old home-rule days before the Bose-Einstein boom. The commercial zone’s masonry colonnades and office blocks reminded visitors that Helena had once been more than just a company town, Compson’s World more than a Trusteeship. Still, there was nothing quaint or old-fashioned about the slums Li’s cab rolled through on the long drive in from the spaceport. They were brand-name UN-wide standard-issue: market democracy in action, legislated by the General Assembly, bankrolled by the Interplanetary Monetary Fund.
Everywhere she looked, she saw the mines. The Anaconda was half a continent away, the next closest Bose-Einstein mine in the remote northern hemisphere, but even at that distance they stamped their mark on the city. Acid rain painted long sulfur-yellow streaks on the composite board walls of the housing projects. A permanent smog of coal dust hung in the air, fed by pea-coal fires in every kitchen. Blue-faced ex-miners shuffled along the sidewalks in the final stages of black-lung, come to the capital to live off their comp checks.
On the outskirts of the industrial zone the cab passed a long weedy stretch of open space. Goalposts leaned crookedly at either end of the field. They’d been white once, but the paint was peeling and streaked with rust. Someone, probably some local welfare group, had taken care of the grass; otherwise, it would long ago have lost its battle against the burning rain.
Eight players were scattered across the field, a few in uniform, the rest dressed in street clothes. As the car passed, one player broke upfield, running with the long sure stride of a born striker. The sun passed out of the clouds just as he took his shot, and a ray of sunlight stabbed across the field, silvering the striker’s legs, the taut arc of the goalie’s body as he leapt to intercept the shot.